Give yourself a gift

I think you might like this book – "Sky is the Limit: The Art of of Upgrading Your Life (50 Classic Self-Help Books Including: Think and Grow Rich, The Way to Wealth, As A Man Thinketh, The ... The Art of War, Acres of Diamonds...)" by Dale Carnegie, Benjamin Franklin, Charles F. Haanel, Florence Scovel Shinn, Wallace D. Wattles, James Allen, Lao Tzu, Khalil Gibran, Orison Swett Marden, Abner Bayley, P.T. Barnum, Marcus Aurelius, Henry Thomas Hamblin, Joseph Murphy, William Crosbie Hunter, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry H. Brown, Russell H. Conwell, William Atkinson, B.F. Austin, H.A. Lewis, L.W. Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks, Sun Tzu, Samuel Smiles. Start reading it for free: http://a.co/1lk7puM

Coupon for our course!

New coupon for our new course in small business tools! Grab the course on using free tools to grow your business in a premium price!

https://www.udemy.com/free-tools-quickly-grow-business/?couponCode=VIPONLY

The 4 personality types intro.

Talking every day to a lot of people, you quickly realize that you cannot communicate the same way with every one and expect great results. Each and every person is different and must be treated in a different way. 

The first time I realized this was when I started teaching martial arts. I was trying to be the best teacher I could be, and even though my physical skills were great, my communication skills needed some work. You see some of my students understood me better when I was talking to them from a distance, some when I was correcting their stance with my hands and others when I was a bit more strict with them. Others wanted a more relaxed environment to learn. 

So looking at behavior models I found the character model from Hippocrates of the 4 personality types which led me to the DISC profiling model, as a more current and complete solution. Now DISC comes from the 4 personalities that it describes

Dominant

Influencer 

Careful

Stable

This model is amazing and you can find whole courses dedicated to it in their page. I strongly recommend to dig a little deeper to it. From their own page I will give you the benefits of their disc profiling model:

"DiSC profiles help you and your team:

Increase your self-knowledge: how you respond to conflict, what motivates you, what causes you stress, and how you solve problems

Improve working relationships by recognizing the communication needs of team members

Facilitate better teamwork and teach productive conflict

Develop stronger sales skills by identifying and responding to customer styles

Manage more effectively by understanding the dispositions and priorities of employees and team members"

The system basically categorizes behaviors as open and closed, and task oriented and people oriented. Now, we people are not just one of those personality types because we kinda have them all inside us. But one of those 4 is more evident in our behavior. Also sometimes during the course of our lives, we transition from one personality type to another. 

We will dig a bir deeper in these personality types in another article. I use them in my sales training here in Greece and it is an amazing solution for effective communication. 

What is the best present?

The best present you can offer to people is your evolved self!

Think about it...

I work in sales coaching here in Thessaloniki Greece, and every day I work with people that try and improve themselves in selling, but this training usually leads to a full blown self development program that helps these people evolve and all the people around them benefit from this. 

Just in the field of effective communication and DISC profiling there are massive improvements in the personal lives of people! 

So, do a real favor to the ones you love and work hard on yourself!

Very inspirational video!

My book is traveling!

And being sold now on Barnes and Noble and Fish pond! So happy about this. A book in sales coaching written in Greek that is now global, is truly something I did not expect when I was writing it a year back... I have also been in Life Coaching now and getting my 3rd book ready for next year!

Listen Loudly!

Put away your phone, focus and try to understand! If you don't understand ASK! Just listen loudly to the person you are talking to and stop thinking about what to answer...listen loudly to understand. The rest will be easy!

Your future self is watching you right now...

My Udemy Profile

With 3 courses in Udemy so far, its safe to say I am now a Udemy Instructor.

2 courses are in Greek. 1 for sales and 1 for Productivity, and my latest course is this

Free tools that will help your business in marketing, sales, organizing and much much more.

Are you a business owner or thinking about starting a business but you have a small or extremely limited budget? Then this course is for you!

Small businesses and start-ups have limited human resources and limited budget. It is just not affordable to hire a good marketing agency, or hire professionals to assist you with marketing, sales, lead management, web development, graphic design etc. If you are a business owner, startup founder or entrepreneur, you need to do all these by yourself (and be really good at it)!

So we thought that you could use a little help from us! We have been doing this for a long time, helping struggling businesses to achieve growth, even with limited resources.

In this course we will present you free & powerful tools that we have been using regularly, testing and implementing them in our client's businesses. We have also included practical examples in order to be easier for you to implement them in your own business.

These tools will help you with the following:

Social Media Management

Graphic Design

Organizing your Business

Boosting your Productivity

Digital Marketing and e-Commerce

'Brick and Mortar' Retail Sales

Our goal is to produce valuable material available to anyone with the desire to grow his business or build a new thriving business even when he is on a very tight budget.

What are the requirements?
A desire to learn & apply this course to grow your business.
Although not necessary, some basic experience on using Social media could be helpful.
Absolutely no budget required, as all these tools & methods are free.
No experience on design required, but awakening your 'inner artist' may prove useful!
In order to use some of the proposed tools, you may have to sign up and create an account for each tool.
What am I going to get from this course?
You will be able to create a professionally-looking presence for your business.
You will be able to start your own business in almost any field with no budget.
How to Use Social Media to grow your business.
How to easily & quickly produce quality content for your Social Media or Blog.
How to start a website, an e-shop or a blog & turn it into a powerful magnet for potential customers.
How to organize your business with powerful tools that are available right now for free.
How to effectively manage Projects and Teams, boost productivity & increase cooperation between team members/employees.
How to boost retail sales in your local 'Brick & Mortar' shops.
What is the target audience?
Everyone that owns or works at a small business.
Entrepreneurs and start-ups with small or limited budget.
People that cannot afford to hire a specialist for their business needs but are willing to try some tools.
Team Leaders or Project Managers who desire to increase the productivity & cooperation in their team.
Small business owners willing to improve/redesign their Marketing Strategy, but they don't know where to start from.

From my latest radio interview!

We talked about sales coaching, business and life coaching in Thessaloniki Greece. We also talked about our new English Online Course Small Business Tools!

Free business tools course LIVE!!!

Our first English course is LIVE!!!
Soooo excited about this! Check it out in Udemy black Friday Sales here!!!

https://www.udemy.com/free-tools-quickly-grow-business

Free tools that will help your business in marketing, sales, organizing and much much more.

What you'll learn

You will be able to create a professionally-looking presence for your business.

You will be able to start your own business in almost any field with no budget.

How to Use Social Media to grow your business.

How to easily & quickly produce quality content for your Social Media or Blog.

How to start a website, an e-shop or a blog & turn it into a powerful magnet for potential customers.

How to organize your business with powerful tools that are available right now for free.

How to effectively manage Projects and Teams, boost productivity & increase cooperation between team members/employees.

How to boost retail sales in your local 'Brick & Mortar' shops.

Μπορείς Περισσότερα! Promo video

Anybody using QuickBooks?

So recently I enrolled in this program called Quickbooks. It is about keeping your accounting yourself. It has an awesome affiliate program that they provide through Growsumo. Has anybody been using Quickbooks? If yes, what is your opinion of it? I am thinking of implementing it myself. 

The links I provide are in the affiliate program, the image is from it too, so please be advised! 

We are addicted to our thoughts

The only time change is possible is when you change your thinking, but how often does this happen?

Prospecting. The basics

I work in sales for about fifteen years now and almost every business that I get to meet has the same problem. A sales problem! Some business owners and salespeople have a limiting belief that sales and revenue are just going to fall from the trees, as we say in Greece. So they are not doing even the basics of prospecting. What are those? Let’s have a look.

Targeting.
The easiest way to have more clients is to know who are the people that need your product or service the most. You must make the proper research, set the criteria by which you will establish your ideal client and start finding them. Instead of losing time with people that clearly do not need you, or waiting for the customer to walk in your shop.

Phone calls.
Sounds simple enough but most of the business owners and salespeople do not know how to use the phone properly. The worst sign for spotting this is when you listen to someone trying to sell a product or a service by the phone. With the exception of telemarketing (where you sell exclusively from the phone), you must use the phone for its biggest strength, to close appointments. You must not try to sell from the phone but to ‘sell’ the appointment.

Needles contacts with prospects.
One major problem is also the inability of salespeople and business owners to understand whether the person sitting in front of them has the ability and need to buy, You must learn to ask the proper questions to the prospect so that you will not waste their time and yours.

Follow up.
It is a fact that most salespeople do not follow up enough with qualified prospect. Being rejected must not be taken personally but as a step of the process. One process that the latest research shows that it takes about 10 to 12 appointments for the prospect to close. So you must provide value in every encounter and do not give up at the first sign of trouble.

Contact variety.
These days you have so much tools available to you that a great deal of people suffer from analysis paralysis and do not use them almost at all. Phone, email, personal visits, skype, social media, letters, and more are just a few. Just be creative and learn to use all of them in the right way. Checklists help a lot.

Personally I believe that it all comes down to activity. If you do not do enough targeted activity every day, you will not see results. But lately with all the new selling-through-the-internet movements people have found a great shadow to hide behind and not expose themselves to face to face time with enough people. Especially business owners that think retail is all about waiting for the customer, when in reality they have to proactively look for the right people to sell to…

Follow me for more advice on selling and business or write to me at info@bizman.gr

Rebrand

Your most valuable asset.

You can't manage time. You cannot manage 5 minutes and end up with 8. Time just passes and as a resource it's truly your most valuable. We all have 24 hours and what we do with them makes the difference between a life of meaning and a meaningless life.

Take Steemit for example. When I think about the hours I have invested in Facebook and Twitter and other social media, only to be treated like a commodity and a resource myself, it makes me angry and kinda depressed. But in here, even the smallest reward on curation or authorship has me excited. Not about the monetary result, even though I have seen some amazing stories of monetary rewards here, but mostly about the feeling that your content produced value.

In my blog at www.bizman.gr  I have produced more than 600 articles. That is a lot of writing! And it has served me really great over the past years. This platform though has taken me to another place, it has pushed me to produce more quality content and to get in touch with more people that do just that and not meaningless post everything that comes their way. Plus it's an amazing opportunity for me to practice my English even more!

So thank you fellow Steemians for this platform and the opportunity to finally invest my most valuable resource to something better!

A salespersons true goal!

Yes I know, salespeople have a bad reputation. But that is only because of some terrible "professionals" that are untrained and unethical. It has happened to all of us. Being in a situation where a bad salesperson has gotten your confidence only to take advantage of it. But hasn't that been the case for some bad doctors? Or politicians? Or technicians?

This shows 2 things:

1. Criminals and bad people are in all professions. It doesn't matter what the card says on it, if you are unethical, it will show and ultimately the market will flush you out.
   
2. Everybody sells. Every time, everywhere. Most people think of selling as an innate ability but the truth is that it is a trainable skill. The most important aspect of it is it's ethics. If you have the best interest of the person you are dealing with in mind, then all you need to do is train the skills to help him reach a decision that is good for HIM!

So I know that each and every person that I meet has a bad story with a salesperson, or just a person, and my first priority is to have his or hers interest first. That's how trust is built.

Read my other articles here.

Getting things done

The small things

Information Consumes attention.

Getting Things Done

GTD is a productivity system that truly sets your mind free for creative thinking! Any Steemian or DTuber out there using it?

I have been using GTD for the past 3 years and, even though I have fallen of the gtd wagon numerous times, most of my projects move forward rapidly and without me feeling overwhelmed or anxious about them.

The main concept is to dump everything in your mind in a trusted system (I use evernote) and free up your mind and psych for more creative thinking. This works brilliantly if you trust the process and the system (which comes about months after you start) and soon becomes second nature! Check out David Allen's work in Amazon and his blog for more info!

I will also post some videos explaining the main concepts of the methodology and also feel free to ask about it and connect!

Posted from SteemIt!!

The small things...

I think it was Markus Aurilius that said "We fought with lions, only to be eaten by mosquitos" or something like that. In our daily grind we often lose the big picture and waste too much time in the small stuff.

Now, in my 40s, I often see old friends that where once filled with dreams and plans now to be bitter task oriented just-pay-the-bills middle aged men. I can't blame them, I understand them. It is so easy to get sucked in the daily grind.

The thing that kept me going is small steps (or even huge ones) EVERY DAY towards my dreams. Seeing most of them come true and feeding on that emotion of "You can make things happen!" if you truly give yourself time to focus on the daily things that will get you to your goals!

So do not let the small stuff make you a small person!

Read my other posts

Never, ever, ever give up...

Information consumes attention.

Never, ever, ever give up...

Information consumes attention.

I was reading a book on productivity called

Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

when I stumbled on the quote that I put on the image. Information today has become more of a problem than a solution for the productive man (or woman).

The sheer volume of it is enough to send you of tracks when working on a project or a goal. That is why I think 2 things are really important when striving for exceptional productivity and time management.

1. Having a daily routine that works in your favor. Build in your days routines and rituals that are about creation and not just reaction to information. That way, if you stick to it, you will limit the time spend on useless browsing and target your energy and focus to the things that will help you the most.
2. Learn to search. I see this problem almost daily. People do not know how to search for information properly and they get lost in the volume of general data coming their way. Take the time to train in retrieving information and you will be more productive and focused!

Don't let information hold you back from action taking and results!

Have an awesome day!

Give time to yourself to gather energy

For a long time I could not understand my energy cycles. Whenever I felt I was low on energy (usually a week in seven weeks period) I thought I could fight through it, which always resulted in taking another week to recover.

Now I understand that this is my energy cycle, I embrace it and lay a bit lower that week. This gives me room to do what is necessary, not over extend my self, and be really productive the other weeks!

Lately I am trying to do the same for my daily routine. Lay of the notifications, or the phone for some period of the day, sleep a little more (I used to get up at 5:30, now its 6:15 and I go a bit earlier in bed) and

DO MORE CREATIVE THAN REACTIVE WORK!

What about you? What are any tricks you can share about your daily routine?

Sometimes my brain is my worst enemy...

Todays quote is from a book I highly recommend called "Breaking the Habit of being yourself" by Dr Joe Dispenza. In it's first pages there is this quote that resonated with me and made realize that sometimes (most of the times) I am my own worst enemy...

Morning Marketing Quote!

Every morning posting a motivational or sales and productivity quote! 

The best way to start your morning is to read something uplifting. Stop reading the news or negative stuff! Have a morning ritual to gain power, lift your spirits and make your day about CREATION! 

Another reason I love the Steemit Platform. It pushes me to create meaningful content.

It is also a great opportunity for me to write in English (which I love) and strive to better at it!

Age and CrossFit....

Finished 1st in class today and being the oldest (42) in it this came in mind....

New logo intro!

Really happy to have a new logo animation for our videos! Even though they are in Greek, subscribe to our channel and we will post in English too! Subscribe here!

Tell us your opinion for the intro!!!!

Count your Mileage...

It saves big when you are on top of your expenses! Things have gone great since I tried Quickbooks! Give it a try!

quickbooks

Thoughts

If we truly embraced the notion that our thoughts produce tangible effects in our lives, wouldn’t we strive to never let one thought slip by us that we didn’t want to experience? And wouldn’t we focus our attention on what we want, instead of continually obsessing about our problems?

Book Quotes Episode #9 Sales training

Δεν ξέρεις να πουλάς; Το νέο βιβλίο πωλήσεων!

A hard week in sales

We 've all been there... Having a bad week, where not only does your sales quota suffer, but everything in your life.

What can you do to control the damage you know you can't avoid?

Quote #1

I thought of you when I read this quote from "The Start-Up J Curve: The Six Steps to Entrepreneurial Success" by Howard Love - "“If you are generating cash, you control your own destiny; if you are consuming cash, eventually someone else controls your destiny.”" Start reading this book for free: http://a.co/hyihfLp

Motivational photo #5

Προσωπική ανάπτυξη, ο δρόμος για την επιτυχία!

Motivational Pic #4

The hardships of retail sales.

Many times, as customers, we tend to forget all the pressure and responsibilities that an owner of a small business has. Retail sales have a lot of demands and the most important of them is the same as in b2b sales, that of being positive and courteous to every customer. 

Customers deserve the best customers service possible, regardless of the problems you might be facing, or the pressure of being a small business owner in an environment so hostile like the Greek economy.

Motivational pic #3

Motivational pic #2

Motivational pic #1

Sales Advice video #1

5+1 Qualities of a great leader

Being a good leader is one of the most important skills one must have in the business world. People need to feel secure and productive around a leader. But what are the qualities of the true leader and how can you develop them?

Win for YOU!

Most people have heard of the expression Win - Win. I have even written an article about this highly successful frame of mind that I abide by for years in the field of professionally selling. Lately though, in the Greek market in all its stressed environment, I have started to notice a peculiar new attitude from my clients and prospects. It is the lack of patience from them in the Win - Win frame of mind and their turn to the Win For Me frame of mind. 

How not to lose time while selling.

One of the biggest issues in b2b sales is the difficulty in finding the person responsible for making a buying decision. Especially in b2b sales that are done door 2 door you end up with stacks of cards and contact information that, if you don't know how to process, leave you with little or no result. But that is not the only way you may be losing time while selling. Let's see some other ways and their solutions too!

The myth of realistic goals

I have come to hate the word “realistic” when it comes to goals because most of the times are based on what other people consider realistic for them. And if I listened to other people when talking about my goals I would not be where I am today…